MAGICIAN'S EFFORT TO DEBUNK SCIENTISTS RAISES ETHICAL ISSUES

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: February 15, 1983

ACONTROVERSY is rippling through the borderlands of science over how best to aid the quest for truth in the marshy backwater of psychic research.

The debate was touched off by a brilliant hoax in which two teenage tricksters, working under cover for more than three years at the behest of James Randi, a magician and psychic debunker of international repute, fooled researchers at Washington University into believing they had paranormal powers.

The ostensible aim of Mr. Randi's hoax was to make psychic researchers rely more widely on the advice of magicians, a goal advocated by many scientists as a sensible way of routing out trickery and self-deception. But even critics of parapsychology are now crying overkill. Some scientists say Mr. Randi, during a press conference in January sponsored by Discover magazine, and on a recent NBC television special, ''Magic or Miracle,'' has exaggerated his victory over the ''classic fatheads'' and set back relations between skeptical scientists and those probing the paranormal.

''Randi is hurting the field with his gross exaggerations,'' says Dr. Marcello Truzzi, a sociologist at Eastern Michigan University and editor of Zetetic Scholar, a journal devoted to the skeptical analysis of paranormal claims. ''In no way will his project teach psychic researchers a lesson and make them more likely to trust to magicians' advice. Quite the contrary. This outside policeman thing sets up magicians as the enemy.''

At best, Mr. Randi's hoax is a masterful triumph of the scientific method - as exercised by a magician - over the crude dabbling of scientists who should be more adept at what they do. At worst, it is an example of science victimized by showmanship.

Parapsychologists apply scientific method to the study of such phenomena as telepathy (communication between minds by extrasensory means), precognition (knowing an event before it occurs), psychokinesis (moving objects by mental energy), and ESP (extrasensory perception).

Debunking is as old as parapsychology itself, both tracing their roots to the founding of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1882. Yet Mr. Randi, known professionally as ''The Amazing'' Randi, has taken the debunking art to new heights. For nearly four decades he has exposed the legerdemain of alleged psychics and attempted to purge parapsychological research of shoddy methodology. His crusade picked up momentum in 1976, when he helped found the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, an august group whose members include such notable scientists and science writers as Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan and B.F. Skinner.

Mr. Randi, feeling psychic researchers often came up with weak excuses for failures of their experiments (such as insufficient funds for correct equipment), decided to embark on an experiment of his own. His hypotheses were two: first, that no matter how much money parapsychologists lavished on equipment, fakes would still be able worm their way through; second, that the researchers, feeling they were too smart to be fooled, would refuse the help of a professional magician.

Mr. Randi saw an opportunity to test his ideas in 1979 when the McDonnell Foundation (created by the late James S. McDonnell, chairman of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation) donated $500,000 to Washington University in St. Louis to set up a psychic research laboratory. Dr. Peter R. Phillips, a physicist, was named director. ''It was the largest grant for parapsychological research ever,'' said Mr. Randi in an interview.

''Project Alpha'' began in October 1979, when the two teen-age magicians, Steven Shaw and Michael Edwards, presented themselves at the lab as psychics able to bend spoons, keys, and other metal objects by the power of concentration alone. It ended at Mr. Randi's January press conference in New York.

Dr. Phillips was not invited to the coup de grace. ''The press conference is revealing of their motives,'' he said in an interview. ''If it was solely a search for scientific truth the experiment would not have been terminated in that way.

''I don't have feelings of resentment,'' he added. ''But of course there are serious ethical questions.'' Indeed, if Mr. Randi were a psychologist, the hoax might have landed him in hot water. ''It sounds like something that would be in our domain,'' said Dr. David Mills, director of the Ethics Office at the American Psychological Association. ''Censure is used by the committee when they feel there is some damage.''

At the news conference, Mr. Randi claimed total victory. The wellheeled St. Louis group tested the boy ''psychics'' and, he asserted, proceeded to publish scientific papers that hailed their powers. The hoax was a success, he said, because the St. Louis group refused his offers to help police the experiments for indications of fraud.

''The worst we can say'' about the McDonnell laboratory, Mr. Randi said, ''is that they were far too confident of their abilities to detect fraud, and refused outside assistance because those who offered it lacked academic credentials.''